Kendall Square - History

History

Originally a salt marsh on the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge, Kendall Square has been an important transportation hub since the construction of the West Boston Bridge in 1793, which provided the first direct wagon route from Boston to Cambridge. By 1810, the Broad Canal had been dug, which would connect with a system of smaller canals in this East Cambridge seaport area.

The area became a major industrial center in the nineteenth century, and by the beginning of the twentieth century was home to distilleries, electric power plants, soap and hosiery factories, and the Kendall Boiler and Tank Company. The square was named after the company, which in turn was named after one of its owners, Edward Kendall. When the Longfellow Bridge replaced the West Boston Bridge in 1907, it included provisions for a future rapid-transit subway link to Harvard Square and Boston (now the Red Line); the original Kendall subway station was opened in 1911. MIT moved to its new Cambridge campus, then located south of Kendall Square between Main Street and Massachusetts Avenue, in 1915.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the area between Kendall and the new CambridgeSide Galleria transformed from an industrial area into a collection of office and research buildings, housing over 150 biotechnology and information technology firms as of 2011. In 1997, the industrial buildings between Third, Binney, Fifth, and Rogers Streets were declared the Blake and Knowles Steam Pump Company National Register District. The Kendall Square Association was formed by approximately 80 organizations in February, 2009.